Margins as Text: Reading Resilience as Knowledge
Written by Linn
〰️
Written by Linn 〰️
Resilience is often spoken of as a trait: the ability to endure, to recover, to keep moving when circumstances conspire to slow you down. In nursing, resilience is rarely optional. It is stitched into the daily fabric of practice, demanded by long hours, shifting crises, and the steady exposure to human vulnerability. Yet to treat resilience only as personal strength is to miss its deeper meaning. Resilience is not just lived; it is knowledge, a way of understanding the world, especially for those whose lives are shaped at the margins. To read resilience as text is to recognize that survival itself produces insight, and that nursing, if attentive, must learn from these texts.
Mary Eliza Mahoney, the first professionally trained Black nurse in the United States, carried resilience into every ward she entered. Her training in the late nineteenth century was not only about mastering techniques but about navigating a system that doubted her presence at every step. Her resilience was not abstract determination but embodied knowledge of exclusion—how to persist within institutions built to keep her out, how to practice excellence as resistance. Edith Cavell, executed during the First World War for helping soldiers escape occupied Belgium, embodied a similar truth. For Cavell, resilience was not passive endurance but the wisdom to know when resistance was the only form of care left. Both women transformed marginality into knowledge, teaching that resilience is not silence in the face of difficulty but the capacity to turn constraint into meaning.
Nursing theorists have articulated this epistemology of resilience in more formal terms. Callista Roy’s adaptation model describes health as a constant process of adjustment, an ongoing negotiation between person and environment. For Roy, resilience is not merely surviving but reorganizing, generating new patterns of life in response to disruption. Dorothea Orem’s self-care deficit theory echoes this insight from another angle. Care begins, she argued, by identifying where individuals cannot adapt alone. Resilience, then, is relational knowledge: a recognition of where adaptation falters and where support must intervene. Together, these frameworks show that resilience is not simply toughness but an interpretive process, a way of reading stressors, recalibrating responses, and sustaining life.
To understand resilience as knowledge transforms how we see patients. The refugee who carries untreated illness also carries stories of survival across borders, losses, and systems of neglect. The patient with chronic disease who has navigated years of barriers knows more about endurance than any clinical algorithm. The family who learns to manage scarce resources in the face of systemic inequality becomes expert in adaptation. For the nurse attentive enough to listen, these are not background stories but essential data. Reading resilience in patients means treating their strategies not as incidental but as insight into what care requires. The margins, in this sense, are not silent; they are filled with texts waiting to be read.
This reframing also forces nursing to confront its own vulnerabilities. In a profession strained by shortages, overwork, and burnout, resilience is too often framed as individual responsibility: do more, endure longer, keep going no matter what. This framing reduces resilience to platitude, demanding sacrifice without acknowledging cost. But if resilience is knowledge, then it must be collective rather than solitary. It must be recognized as wisdom to be cultivated and shared, not exhaustion to be normalized. Nurses already carry survival strategies—rotations of emotional labor, informal peer mentoring, networks of solidarity—that function as texts of resilience. These practices must not remain invisible; they must be institutionalized, protected, and honored as knowledge that keeps the profession alive.
There is also an ethical dimension. To read resilience as knowledge requires humility: an acknowledgment that those at the margins often know more about survival than those at the center. Patients who endure structural inequality, nurses who navigate systemic barriers, communities who resist erasure—all produce insights that formal curricula often miss. To dismiss these lessons is to reproduce the very exclusions that resilience resists. To read them well is to expand nursing’s knowledge base beyond what is taught in textbooks, into what is lived in struggle.
Philosophy lends language to this recognition. Michel Foucault suggested that knowledge is always shaped by power, that what counts as knowledge reflects who is permitted to speak. Reading resilience as text is, in part, an act of resistance against that exclusion. It insists that survival is knowledge, that marginal voices hold authority, and that nursing must listen if it is to care fully. Resilience becomes not only a personal quality but a political epistemology, demanding recognition that endurance itself is expertise.
The future of nursing may depend on embracing resilience in this way. As technology accelerates and systems strain, there will be temptation to reduce care to efficiency, to treat resilience as endless labor extracted from professionals and patients alike. Such reduction is unsustainable. To honor resilience as knowledge is to reimagine it not as demand but as resource, to ask not only how nurses endure but what their endurance teaches about systems, inequities, and human possibility.
We began with resilience as a word too easily flattened into cliché, invoked as empty praise for surviving difficulty. By tracing the stories of Mahoney and Cavell, the theories of Roy and Orem, and the lived wisdom of patients and professionals, resilience emerges differently. It is not platitude but text, not slogan but knowledge. To nurse is to read resilience everywhere—in patients, in colleagues, in communities—and to translate that knowledge into practice. The margins, when read well, are not peripheral but prophetic, pointing the way toward a profession that learns as deeply from survival as it teaches about healing.
